German concentration and extermination camps were run by the speakers of one language but inhabited by speakers of many others. Interpretation became necessary to both sides. Linguistic skills helped some inmates to survive, but the deployment of these skills could involve a cost.

A language, it has been said, is a dialect with an army, or at the least one with a regional assembly. A new study, which seeks to identify patterns of ecological constraints operating on the circulation of literary texts, suggests that a “language is a dialect with a literature”.

Shifted whole from one language to another, philosophical terms leave behind a rich history of usage, interpretation, and interaction with other terms. To understand them properly we must recover some of that past, working against the grain of the monologic of the monoglot.

In what might be called the cartoon version of our modern history, the Irish language is corralled in with land and religion as a shibboleth of the anti-modern. This is to ignore elements of the language movement which were innovative, dynamic and successful.

Animals have been divided into those we watch TV with, those we eat and those we’re scared of. If ‘becoming animal’ is understood in Hiberno-English as an unfortunate consequence of excessive alcohol consumption, here it is rather a way of perceiving that we exist on a planet that we share with innumerable other species that we continue to destroy in vast numbers.

Inspired by atomistic science, thinkers in early modern England, including John Locke, developed a conceptual framework whereby it is the mixture of parts, unregulated by any superior form, which constitutes both the natural world and the body politic.

Wolfram Schmidgen explores this school of thought which challenged the dominant, Aristotelian world view in the early days of modernity.

Orwell got it wrong. It is not governments but banks, insurance companies, pension funds and low-cost airlines, the raucous cheerleaders of deregulation, that oppress and stupefy us with a network of small and baffling rules.